دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی تاثیر استراتژی کسب و کار در محیط اطلاعات شرکت - Sage 2017

Abstract

This study examines whether a firm’s business strategy affects their information environment. Organizational theory suggests that firms following an innovative ‘‘prospector’’ strategy have greater incentives to provide more frequent voluntary disclosures than firms following an efficient ‘‘defender’’ strategy. Furthermore, prospectors are more likely to attract greater coverage by external information intermediaries. We find that prospectors engage in more frequent management earnings guidance, issue more press releases, and are followed by more financial analysts compared with defenders. Next, we examine the association between business strategy and information asymmetry. We find that despite prospectors having attributes associated with information asymmetry (e.g., R&D, growth options), prospectors have lower information asymmetry than defenders. We attribute this finding to prospectors’ greater access to both internal and external sources of disclosure compared with defender firms, which we confirm using mediation analysis. Collectively, our results suggest that business strategy does affect firms’ information environments, incremental to known determinants, and that strategy serves as a useful context for understanding a firm’s underlying information environment.

Conclusion

In this study, we use organizational theory to examine whether information environments vary across firms following different business strategies. First, we find evidence that innovation-oriented prospector strategy firms issue more management earnings guidance and press releases and attract greater levels of analyst coverage compared with efficiencyoriented defender strategy firms. Next, we find that prospectors have lower information asymmetry than defenders. These results suggest that prospectors’ greater access to both internal and external sources of information ultimately result in decreased levels of information asymmetry compared with defenders. We provide further support for this proposition using mediation analysis.

Our research is subject to several caveats. First, while we rely on organizational theory and prior empirical research to create our business strategy measure, a limitation of our study is the extent to which measurement error leads to misclassifying some firms’ business strategies. However, we rely on a strategy measure validated in prior studies, and any misclassification should add noise, rather than bias, to our tests. We are also unable to model the original decision to pursue a business strategy or to examine the effect of changes in a firm’s business strategy on their information environment.

Our study makes several contributions. First, because firms’ business strategies are stable over time, identifying firms’ business strategies serves as a useful context for understanding the numerous interdependencies related to firms’ information environments. Second, our study provides insights into how firms’ strategic objectives likely minimize or encourage more frequent voluntary disclosures. Finally, by linking organizational theory to firms’ disclosures and their overall information environments, we provide a framework for understanding why business strategy is an underlying determinant of firms’ information environments.